OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Possible? It's difficult to date exactly when BioWare 'went woke', and it probably depends on how you define 'woke', but I'd say it's probably the early 2010s when they started to get aggressively preachy about it. KotOR and Jade Empire start to dip their toe into the idea of same-sex romance, but very little. DA:O and ME1 have some in the way of social commentary, with ME1 noticeably in favour of liberal humanitarian and cosmopolitan norms (the pretense that Renegade is not the evil path was never very convincing, even in 2007), but DA:O is surprisingly nuanced and fair.
I think DA2 and ME3 are probably where it gets bad, with DA2's ham-fisted approach to social strife, and ME3 was the one that, with Cortez, started directly preaching about marriage. (I note that ME2 and TOR were BioWare's last games to contain exclusively straight romances.) In general ME3 is noticeably more morally simplistic than its predecessors - where in ME2 the genophage was a complicated, ambivalent issue with Mordin making a persuasive defence of it, in ME3 Mordin has switched sides between games, so now all the good guys are on the one side and the pro-genophage camp is just evil. Likewise ME3 is just pro-geth in a way that strips out any kind of nuance from the issue. The writing has noticeably gotten worse. And then DA:I obviously has a couple of preaching scenes, and Veilguard is a dumpster fire.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Entirely possible. I am not asserting that in terms of content, Hanania, or for that matter Scott Alexander, are frequently correct. I think they both get lots of things wrong. I'm asserting that the mere fact that Hanania has a consistent worldview or agenda, in itself, is not a reason to dismiss him.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
You didn't. I was just picking a few examples of similar internet pundits with different viewpoints to Hanania. DeBoer is frequently wrong, but I don't think he's dismissed simply because he has an overall direction to his thought. Every online writer has some kind of direction or narrative to their thought. Hanania ought to be treated the same way as deBoer or Alexander or Yglesias.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Why would you think that this is a criticism unique to Hanania versus just most pundits in general? Most pundits in general should have their arguments for their preferred narratives discounted.
Because I don't think most citations of pundits here are met with this kind of backlash. I perceive Hanania to be singled out as particularly lacking in credibility. My response is not that Hanania is necessarily correct on any issue, but rather that he should not be dismissed for reasons unrelated to his actual positions.
For what it's worth I find the argument about assessing counter-arguments and changing one's views to be an odd one to apply to Hanania, because Hanania is somebody who changed his preferred narrative in response to experience, surely? Hanania used to be an edgy racist, and wrote about how he changed his mind. If changing one's mind is a sign of intellectual honesty, he seems to meet that bar.
To your objections towards the end, I'm happy to revise any of the specific language, but I read you as suggesting that a person who has consistently advocated for a single position or narrative without changing it is less trustworthy than a person who has changed their position. This seems unintuitive, to me.
"You're Catholic" is absolutely a valid criticism of someone trying to convince you that some piece of information proves that Catholicism is true. The piece of information truly might prove that Catholicism is true, but an already-believing Catholic can't be trusted to make that judgment call.
I'm ambivalent on how reasonable this is.
On the one hand, a Catholic would seem to have a natural bias towards the truth of Catholicism. If we are evaluating some novel piece of information that may or may not bear on the truth of Catholicism, we should expect the Catholic to be predisposed to interpreting that evidence in ways that support the truth of Catholicism. In that sense knowing that the person is Catholic should make us more skeptical of any Catholicism-supporting conclusions they draw.
On the other hand... I would expect people who encounter evidence that Catholicism is true to be disproportionately Catholic, because factual beliefs can be motivating. Suppose there's an argument that, if correct, shows that Catholicism is true. Obviously people who think that the argument is correct are going to convert to Catholicism - I'd question anybody who didn't. To say that we can't trust Catholics on the subject of Catholicism is to stack the deck. People who find Catholicism convincing become Catholics. If by doing so they remove themselves from the community of people with whom we can have reasonable discussion about Catholicism, well, then we would seem to have an arbitrary prejudice against Catholicism. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, for any belief or ideology.
For instance - you can't trust evolutionary biologists on the subject of whether evolution is true. They're evolutionary biologists! We should immediately distrust the testimony of people who believe evolution is true on the subject of evolution. That seems absurd. So too with everything else.
The problem is that both these points seem compelling to me, to an extent, especially because for an overarching ideology like Catholicism, people are likely to adopt Catholicism for reasons unrelated to the merits of any given argument. This is less the case for a specific theory like evolution, though ideologies like rationalism, conservatism, socialism, etc., are more like Catholicism than they are like evolution. I think where I end up is that we should not rule partisans of a particular ideology out of discussions of that ideology, though we should be aware of their biases and take them into account. Thus, say, Catholics can and should be consulted on the subject of whether or not Catholicism is true (we can hardly expect anybody else to make the case for Catholicism!), but we should be more critical than usual of their assessments of new information.
On Hanania specifically:
Now, it's possible that it is factually not the case that it's his schtick, but rather that he genuinely takes a skeptical look at each new piece of evidence and is helplessly forced to conclude, despite his best efforts to prove otherwise, that his narrative is shown to be correct yet again.
I guess I don't see a valid criticism of Hanania here relative to other pundits. Yes, I'm sure it's true that his positions are a combination of sincere assessment of new data and his best interpretation thereof and a retrofitting of that new data into his existing conceptual framework. He has an existing view or narrative of the world, he will think that narrative is correct or at least the best, most plausible one available, and when he obtains new information, he starts by trying to fit that information into that narrative.
But the last I checked that was how everybody thinks. Everybody has narratives or interpretative frameworks that they apply to experience, and first interpret new evidence in ways that fit with their existing categories. It's only when new evidence becomes overwhelming, or else so dramatically contradicts the existing framework as to be undeniable, that they are forced to reconsider.
I'd say that, by default, everyone should be presumed to be falling prey to confirmation bias all the time, doubly so if their preferred narrative is self aggrandizing, triply if that person is particularly intelligent and thus better able to fit evidence to narrative. It's only by credibly demonstrating that they are open to other narratives that they can earn any sort of credibility that their arguments have any relationship with reality. That's where showing oneself to be capable of undermining one's preferred narrative comes in, and there's no better way to demonstrate this capability than by doing it.
Can you think of any particular examples of this? The thing is, what this sounds like to me in practice is the idea that everybody should be presumed to be dishonest except for people who have radically changed their belief systems.
That seems like a heuristic that will easily lead one astray - it would imply, for a start, that inconsistent opportunists are more (intellectually) trustworthy than people who stick to their principles. Doesn't that seem bizarre?
OliveTapenade
19hr ago
How can that be distinguished from any pundit who has a consistent worldview, though? Certainly we should take all pundits with a grain of salt, but I can't see anything that makes Hanania worse or less trustworthy than any comparable pundit. Scott Alexander has a bunch of narratives that he's selling - rationalism, effective altruism, AI nonsense. Freddie deBoer has a bunch of narratives he's selling - Marxism, socialism, education reform. Matt Yglesias has a bunch of narratives he's selling - YIMBYism, economic centrism. It feels to me like you're holding Hanania to a higher standard that every other Substack bloviator out there.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I'm sorry, I don't follow the actual criticism here, or what you think I need to prove.
This tangent began with hydroacetylene writing:
Richard Hanania’s whole schthick is ‘republicans are dumb but I’m stuck on the same side of the aisle’. No matter the news of the day, he has to come up with that take.
You should, accordingly, downgrade the weight of evidence of him coming up with that take.
I read this as stating that it is unsurprising that Hanania states things consistent with things that he has stated previously. Well, yes. But this hardly seems to make sense as a criticism of him. Intellectual consistency is not a vice.
This was followed by Dean stating:
Equivalent to the Pope claiming Catholicism is the one true way. If he wasn't saying that, he wouldn't be the Pope.
Hannia's brand is basically to present himself as the much neglected wiseman that the right should be listening to. Leveraging this self-styled reputation is how he makes money.
Again, it's not clear how this is any kind of valid criticism of Hanania - any more than "you're Catholic!" is a valid criticism of the pope. Hanania's articles tend to be consistent with articles that Hanania has written in the past. The pope's statements tend to be consistent with the pope's previous statements. If there's a difference between the two of them, it's that Catholicism is explicitly formalised as an ideology in a way that Hanania-ism is not.
And, yes, Hanania makes money from people paying to read his writing, but I missed the part where that was a criticism.
My objection is that these criticisms prove too much. It's bad when authors give takes consistent with their previous takes? It's bad when authors make money from their writing? These criticisms, if generalised, exclude almost every writer.
Now, to your comment specifically:
Show examples of him holding to his principles, whatever you propose them to be, in a way that undermines Dean's view of his 'brand'.
Yes, Hanania has a financial interest in catering to his readership. This is true of every author who gets paid for their writing, including every Substacker in the world. We do not automatically dismiss all writing on this basis.
I am aware of no compelling reason to believe that Hanania is insincere in the top article here, and at any rate, even if he were, that wouldn't invalidate any of the observations in the article itself.
So I am left very confused at what seems to me to be a desperate and unproductive groping for an ad hominem. What is the point?
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I'm not sure how to distinguish this from Hanania having a consistent view and Hanania believing that he is correct. That seems like a standard that would rule out pretty much everybody.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
It's amazing - it's the sheer, corny sincerity of it, I think?
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I think that's actually a good example of the general Blizzard problem, when it comes to storytelling. Blizzard make amazing cutscenes, but it's very obvious that what they do is create a couple of pre-set 'high points' for their stories, the dramatic moments that will have cutscenes, and then fill in everything between those moments - and the fillings are largely nonsense. Even in Warcraft III, all the cutscenes are amazing, but then you play the missions in between them and get to enjoy awful, wooden dialogue and endless plot contrivance. Very little in Warcraft III's story makes sense, and the dialogue is cringeworthy, and it has only gotten worse from there.
Thus with Starcraft II or Diablo III or World of Warcraft - the usual course is a farrago on nonsense leading up to a dramatic, technically excellent four or five minute film, and then back to nonsense, perhaps on the logic that people will only remember the cutscenes.
Let me take a specific example - Battle for Azeroth is widely considered a terrible expansion, with a nonsensical plot that engaged in rampant character assassination, and where entire factions were derailed. Nonetheless, consider a few cutscenes. The BfA trailer is amazing. You need practically zero context for it, but if you enjoy random high fantasy people fighting each other in spectacular ways, wow, that trailer delivers. Now 'Old Soldiers'. That orc and that troll look fantastic, extremely human and emotional, and it's a powerful, quiet moment as they reflect on the loss and sacrifice of war, and it puts the BfA trailer in a new context. Now 'Warbringers: Jaina'. Obviously lower production values than the others, but a genuinely haunting moment, as a character once known for her empathy and pacifism, to the point of once siding with the orcs over her own father out of a desire for peace, realises she was wrong and embraces a militant mindset. This then led up to an in-game cutscene at the battle in the trailer where she appears with the ghost ship and, again, without context it's genuinely cool.
And look, those four cutscenes without much context all string together in a way that might seem excellent, right? The Horde and the Alliance are at war, we've got some complicated emotional journeys on both sides, real ambivalance around the necessity, even glory, but also the horror of war, and so on.
But trust me, if you have played Battle for Azeroth, you will know that all the connective tissue between those moments is horrible. There are potentially interesting moments here, like Jaina's or Saurfang's development, but the game constantly whiffs on the execution, or changes its mind and goes back on what the cutscenes seemed to imply, or even just forgets about what it was doing; and I haven't even mentioned Sylvanas yet.
Blizzard are very good at making "pretty awesome" cutscenes. But cutscenes alone do not a compelling story make.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Some time around 2010 seems like the inflection point, yeah.
With BioWare in particular it's shocking how well that cut off-works. You have Baldur's Gate II (2000), Neverwinter Nights (2002), Knights of the Old Republic (2003), Jade Empire (2005), Mass Effect (2007), Dragon Age: Origins (2009), and Mass Effect 2 (2010), all of which are excellent. (I'd accept a quibble on NWN, but even so, the standard is very high.) But once you get past 2010, you have Dragon Age 2 (2011), The Old Republic (2011), Mass Effect 3 (2012), Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017), Anthem (2019), and Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024). The decline in quality is both large and rapid.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
It is entirely true that native Japanese discussion of most issues, including Assassin's Creed, is different to what you can get by reading English language media. This is true for pretty much every country in the world. English language media by itself will give you a distorted picture of pretty much anything, but Japan is especially bad. For gaming in particular, I'm fortunate enough to know a couple of native Japanese people who pass me gossip so I have a slight inkling of the scope of the misrepresentation.
That said, the top level post here is very strange. Very strange indeed.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I'm not sure what your point is. Intellectual consistency is... bad? Uninteresting? Something else?
OliveTapenade
4d ago
It's a short, four episode UK TV series about a teenager who murders a classmate. It's being interpreted as a penetrating look at the radicalisation of young boys by social media.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Oh, and to that I should add works like Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, or even Frank Herbert's original concept for the Butlerian Jihad, where even perfectly well-behaved thinking machines might challenge what it means to be human metaphysically. Even that has been considered potentially existentially threatening. It's not literal destruction, but what if machines change our very concept of what it means to be alive, or to have a soul?
Less Wrong asked some of these questions in the 2010s, but then, so did Mass Effect. It's a genre staple.
I was struck, thinking about it for this, by just how diverse the genre is?
You have the classic 'killer robot' trope, where the machines are just plain evil and intentionally want to destroy humanity - thus Skynet or AM.
You have the machine that is faithfully executing the commands given to it in good faith and threatens to destroy everything out of ignorance - thus WOPR.
You have the machine that is attempting to fulfil its designed purpose in good faith but which suffers some kind of fatal error and goes crazy - thus HAL 9000.
You have the machines that genuinely want the best for humanity and try to achieve that even contrary to our explicitly stated preferences - think 'With Folded Hands' (1947), or Asimov played around with this. 'The Evitable Conflict' (1950) was about machines taking charge of the future with humanity's welfare in mind, and seems ambivalent about whether that's desirable.
It seems like these categories cover most plausible AI fears. The AI could be actively hostile to humans, the AI could be indifferent to or ignorant of human life, the AI could be schizophrenic or malfunctioning, and the AI could be benevolent in ways that we do not desire.
Obviously none of these stories map perfectly to contemporary worries, but there's enough, I think, that the concept of AI or robots or machines going wrong in a dangerous way was firmly stuck in the public consciousness long before an autodidact started a blog in 2009.
I don't particularly see Less Wrong as having been important in popularising the idea that AI might be dangerous - come on, killer robot or killer AI stories have been prominent in popular culture for decades. Less Wrong launched in 2009. The film WarGames was from 1983, and it was hardly original at the time. The Terminator is from 1984. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is from 1967. 2001: A Space Odyssey is from 1968, based on stories from the 1950s. There are multiple Star Trek episodes about mad computers! It seems ridiculous to me to even suggest that Less Wrong led the charge on popularising the idea that AI could go badly. AI going badly is a cliché well over half a century old - it predates home computers!
Not that I think this even particularly matters, because as far as I can tell the AI safety movement has achieved very little, and perhaps more importantly, the goal of that movement is to slow down AI development, which seems like the opposite of what you gave the rationalists credit for.
More generally I am by no means surprised that lots of people in Silicon Valley are aware of rationalists, or even call themselves rationalists. What I'm questioning is whether there's a causal relationship between that and the development of AI or LLM technology. That may have been something that some of them believed, but so what? Perhaps being rationalist-inclined and developing AI are both downstream of some third factor (the summer, in the ice cream drowning example). They seem to me both plausibly downstream of being analytical computer-inclined nerds raised on a diet of science fiction, for instance. It's just all part of the same culture.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Even though they are both describing the same general category of behaviour, the symbolic role that violence plays in their model of the world is radically different. There are many ways to cash out what that means in practice - for one, for Kulak, violence in itself represents a kind of success, a triumph over our sheepish instincts, whereas for the other, violence in itself is a failure, an undesired last resort that always carries a terrible cost. Either way, it means that the worldviews just don't translate into each other neatly. The whole world of moral assumptions around, say, Orestes choosing to engage in retributive violence to avenge his father is invisible and alien to the modern reactionary.
Violence is an extreme example, but I daresay there are similar clashing worldviews in other politics. Probably the one I've run into most often today is the concept of revolution, where even though two people may both be talking about the overthrow and replacement of a particular political establishment, the invisible worlds of assumptions around it are so divergent as to almost untranslatable.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Yudkowsky himself? He's best described as an educator and popularizer. He's hasn't done much in terms of practical applications, beyond founding MIRI, which is a bit player. But right now, leaders of AI labs use rationalist shibboleths, and some high ranking researchers like Neel Nanda, Paul Christiano and Jan Leke (and Ryan Moulton too, he's got an account here to boot) are all active users on LessWrong.
That the rationalist subculture is something that some people in the tech industry are also into by no means means that rationalists can take credit for AI companies.
(Though frankly why you would want to is beyond me - "is responsible for AI" is something that lowers my estimation of someone, rather than raises it.)
You presented a genetic or causal relationship:
You believe that the Rationalist movement is an "utter failure", when it has spawned the corporations busy making God out of silicon.
But the fact that some people are both rationalists and work at AI companies does not show that rationalists are the reason those companies exist - "rationalists caused AI" is of the same order as "ice cream causes drowning".
OliveTapenade
7d ago
That's about as organised and consistent as I expect racial identification in the Americas to be!
OliveTapenade
7d ago
The census bureau categories don't have great overlap with how people behave in real life, though, do they? For instance, the census categories include Middle Easterners as white.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Rachel Zegler, even though she is probably about 3/4ths European genetically, is viewed as a brown woman both by the left and the right.
Isn't this the case for pretty much all Hispanics?
American racial categories have never made much sense to me, but taking 'Hispanic' as roughly coterminous with 'South and Central American', the vast majority of Hispanics are in fact significantly European in descent. I understand most South Americans to be mixtures of European and indigenous American, with the exact proportion changing from place to place and class to class; in general, the higher the social class the more European descent, but there are plenty of exceptions. There are also a lot of South Americans with partial or majority African descent, but the fact that we use terms like 'Afro-Hispanic' or 'black' for them suggests that we consider them slightly differently?
It does confuse me a little - as I understand it, all Brazilians, say, are Hispanic, even though they are ethnically diverse and include white, black, indigenous, and mixed-race people.
(Technically you could argue that Brazilians aren't Hispanic at all - sometimes I see 'Hispanic' as synonym for 'Hispanophone', and Brazilians are Lusophone - but American racial categories don't have a separate section for Brazilians. In general I get the sense that in America, Brazilians are lumped in with Hispanics, and Spanish people are not, even though in the literal sense Brazilians are not related to Hispania and the Spanish should be the central example.)
Anyway, Zegler is majority-European-descent, but isn't that quite common among Hispanics? Most Mexicans are mestizos, i.e. of partial but significant European descent, and then roughly a third of Mexicans are just European. I think that even white Mexicans would be considered 'Hispanic' in the United States? Or am I mistaken?
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I wonder if this is the natural course of all Substackers? Fleeing big media for Substack was meant to be a way to seek independence from traditional constraints, but if it just enables a stronger form of audience capture that ever existed before, while encouraging writers to avoid risks and double down on the same crowd-pleasing themes over and over, we may find ourselves missing the old system.
Kulak isn't a journalist, of course, but I do notice something of the process with more 'mainstream' Substackers. It may have taken a few years, but, to pick an example, I feel like Freddie deBoer has ended up just writing the same half dozen articles over and over, as predictable as the tide. I can think of a few others that I read that seem to be sliding down the same incline.
Maybe it's all just bad.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I remember quite enjoying a piece he wrote about Shakespeare. But I suppose the internet does have a tendency to turn people into parodies of themselves. Even people like Trace, bless him, feel like they've become flattened over time - or at least their online personae have.
I'm not in the business of awarding 'points', whatever that's supposed to mean.
I presume that in this case Hanania is making an argument about populism that he believes is both true and useful. It seems far more productive, to me, to either accept or critique that argument. Who cares what imaginary score he may or may not have? The only thing I can reasonably ask of a pundit is that they attempt, to the best of their ability, to say things that are true, useful, or insightful. As far as I can tell Hanania is doing that. What else ought he do?
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